You might be forgiven for assuming that, if you selected a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), backup and recovery solutions from strong market leaders, automating your cloud with seamlessly integrated, application-aware, policy-driven Backup as a Service (BaaS) would be a no-brainer.

Sure.

Tried it lately?

The Crew

VMware’s vRealize Automation (vRA) is the prohibitive favorite choice for running corporate clouds. According to IDC, vRealize Automation not only nearly doubles the market share of its closest competitors in Cloud Systems Management, it leads in share and growth rate for Datacenter Automation Software.

Veeam is both the fastest growing software vendor and, according to Ovum, the top pick for Data Availability and Protection.

Both solutions have great market presence, large satisfied customer base and extensive ecosystems. However, until now there has not been a simple path to automated, policy-driven and application-aware backups from within vRealize Automation.

There’s an Arthur Bloch saying that I have always liked, “Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer.” In this case though, we don’t need a bigger hammer, we need a better hammer.

Current instruments are limited in backup options

Back in The Dark Ages (say last year), most cloud teams had limited options for backing up applications. They could either:

Have the backup team execute traditional automated backups that had poor visibility into application requirement inside of VMs

OR

Manually implement policy-based backups.

It may go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway — backing up without clear visibility into application-level requirements is bad and, at least for clouds, any repeating activity that requires manual operations is probably even worse.

To be clear, here’s what we need to be able to do on the way to policy-driven and application-aware backups:

Set specific backup job(s)

Have those applicable across tape, disk to disk to tape, deduplication, on premises or cloud-based backup

Recover to a specific restore point

Recover to a specific folder or file

Back up instantly

Change any of these policies and entitlements

Apply them across vRealize Automation machine endpoints.

Fortunately, there is now another and much better option.

A “better hammer” – Veeam and vRealize Automation integration

vRealize Automation can now be seamlessly combined with Veeam Availability solutions to deliver you the desired level of automation for cloud backup and recovery. This integration is implemented through the SovLabs Framework, which features an architecture that quickly, repeatedly and safely integrates third-party solutions for IPAM, DNS, load balancing, service management, (pauses to catch breath) configuration management, platform-specific extensions AND (drum roll, please) Veeam Backup as a Service, natively into vRealize Automation.

Leveraging the SovLabs Module Framework the Veeam Backup as a Service module allows you to assign backup job, self-service VM and file/folder-level recovery and instant backup directly in vRealize Automation.

What does the new integration deliver?

Simple setup

Ability to address one or more Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager Endpoints

SovLabs Backup Profiles with the following features

Ability to allow the end-user to choose the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager endpoint and/or protection job at time of request

Pin backup job(s) to vRealize Automation blueprints

Self-service VM recovery

Self-service file/folder-level recovery

Self-service instant recovery with VeeamZIP

End-user notifications

To drive the final nails

For a variety of both technical and non-technical reasons, backup is good and necessary. Actually, good backups are good and necessary. Less-than-good backups are ticking bombs. To ensure that backups add value to your enterprise cloud environments, those backups have to be application-aware, policy-driven, and automatically provisioned.

Fortunately, that functionality is now driven all the way home by the powerful combination of VMware, SovLabs and Veeam solutions.

Read also:

Backups for your cloud: Don’t force IT, get a “better hammer”, 5.0 out of 5 based on 3 ratings

David Coulter

David Coulter is a chief technology officer at SovLabs, an innovative Atlanta-based software vendor, building extensible frameworks for data center and cloud technologies, most notably for VMware's vRealize Automation. David’s background is in systems architecture, operations and software development, with a major focus on automation... More